Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Communism with the Mask Off by Joseph Goebbels

THE RIGHT WING CLAIMS THAT HITLERISM AND STALINISM WERE THE SAME, SOME GO AS FAR AS CLAIMING THE ARE BOTH EXAMPLES OF SOCIALISM, LETS ASK AN EXPERT;

WARNING ANTI-SEMITIC TEXT

German Propaganda Archive Calvin University

Background: This speech was delivered to the annual congress of the Nazi Party on 13 September 1935. Goebbels was rather proud of the effort. He wrote in his diary on 15 September: “A brilliant success. The Führer was genuinely enthused. A storm of applause, My material was deeply moving.”

The source: This text is taken from the English translation published by the Nazis in 1935. The spelling is British, and the quality of the translation is not the best.

Communism with the Mask Off

by Joseph Goebbels


In the beginning of August, this year, one of the most authoritative English newspapers published a leading article entitled “Two Dictatorships”, in which a naive and misdirected attempt was made to place before the readers of the paper certain alleged similarities between Russian Bolshevism and German National Socialism. This article gave rise to an extraordinary amount of heated discussion in international centres, which was only another proof of the fact that an astonishing misconception exists among the most prominent West European circles as to the danger which communism presents to the life of the individual and of the nation. Such people still cling to their opinion in face of the terrible and devastating experiences of the past eighteen years in Russia.

The author of the article stated that the two symbols which are to-day opposed to one another, namely that of Bolshevism and National Socialism, stand for regimes which “in essential structure are similar and in many of their laws-their buttresses-are identical. The similarity is moreover increasing.” He went on to say:

“In both countries are the same censorships on art, literature, and of course the Press, the same war on the intelligentsia, the attack on religion, and the massed display of arms, whether in the Red Square or the Tempelhofer Feld.”

“The strange and terrible thing is”, he declared, “that two nations, once so widely different, should have been schooled and driven into patterns so drably similar.”

One sees here much verbiage and little understanding. The anonymous writer of this article has obviously not studied the essential and fundamental principles either of National Socialism or Bolshevism. He considers merely certain superficial phenomena and he has not taken cognisance of what serious journalists have had to say on the matter in question or compared his views with their objective statements. This entirely erroneous judgment of the case might be passed over with a shrug of the shoulders and considered merely as part of the daily order of things, were it not for the fact that the two problems here discussed belong in their essentials to political phenomena which are important for the future of Europe. Moreover this strikingly cursory judgment on the problem is not merely a single case but has to be taken in conjunction with a much wider and more influential section of West European opinion.

In contradistinction to this, I shall try here to analyse Bolshevism into its basic elements and show these as clearly as I can to the German and European public. This is not an easy task, in view of the fact that the Propagandist Institutions of the Communist International are undoubtedly well organised and have not been unsuccessful in putting before the public of the world, outside of the Russian frontiers, an entirely false picture of Bolshevism. This picture is an extraordinarily dangerous one because of the tension which it can and must naturally cause. Let us also note the profound hatred in liberal circles throughout the world in regard to National Socialism and its practical constructive work in Germany. Hence the possibility here also of mistaken judgments, such as these already mentioned. They pass by what is essential. International communism would entirely do away with all national and racial qualities which are founded in human nature itself; in property it sees the most primary cause of the break-down of world trade in the capitalist system. Accordingly it exploits this through an extensive and carefully organised and brutal system of action, setting aside personal values and sacrificing the individual to a hollow mass-idol that is only a travesty of actual life itself. At the same time it ignores and destroys all the idealistic and higher strivings of men and nations, through its own crass and empty materialist principles. On the other hand, National Socialism sees in all these things—in property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism—these forces which carry on every human civilisation and fundamentally determine its worth.

Bolshevism is explicitly determined on bringing about a revolution among all the nations. In its own essence it has an aggressive and international tendency. But National Socialism confines itself to Germany and is not a product for export, either in its abstract or practical characteristics. Bolshevism denies religion as a principle, fundamentally and entirely. It recognises religion only as an “opium for the people.” For the help and support of religious belief, however, National Socialism absolutely places in the foreground of its programme a belief in God and that transcendental idealism which has been destined by Nature to bring to expression the racial soul of a nation. National Socialism would give the lead in a new concept and shaping of European civilisation. But the Bolshevics carry on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such. Bolshevism is not merely anti-bourgeois; it is against human civilisation itself.

In its final consequences it signifies the destruction of all the commercial, social, political and cultural achievements of Western Europe, in favour of a deracinated and nomadic international cabal which has found its representation in Judaism. This grandiose attempt to overthrow the civilised world is so much more dangerous in its effects because the Communist International, which is a past master in the art of misrepresentation, has been able to find its protectors and pioneers among a great part of these intellectual circles in Europe whose physical and spiritual destruction much be the first result of a Bolshevic world revolution.

Bolshevism, which is in reality an attack on the world of the spirit, pretends to be intellectual itself. Where circumstances demand, it comes as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But underneath the false mask which it here and there assumes there are always the satanic forces of world destruction. And where it has had the opportunity of practising its theories it has created “The Paradise of the Workers and Peasants”, in the shape of a fearful desert of starving and hungering people. If we are to take the word of its doctrine then we find a terrible contradiction between its theory and its practice. Its theory is glowing and grandiose but it carries poison in its attractive gloss. Over against this, what we have from it in reality is terrible and forbidding. This is shown in the millions of sacrifices which have been made in honour of it, through executions with the sword, the axe or the hangman’s rope or hunger. Its teaching promises “the fatherland of the workers and peasants”, which shall know no frontiers, and a classless social order which will be protected against exploitation through the state, and it preaches an economic principle in which “everything belongs to everybody” and that thereby a real and universal world peace will be ushered in.

Millions of workers on hunger-wages such as are not thought of in western Europe, millions of afflicted and sorrowing peasants who have been robbed of their land, which is being completely ruined by the stupid experiment of a paralysing collectivism, famine which claims millions of victims year after year in a country of such vast extent that it might serve as a granary for the whole of Europe, the formation and equipping of an army which, according to the claims of all leading Bolshevists, is to be used for carrying out the world revolution, the brutal and merciless domination of this madly-led apparatus of State and Party at the hands of a small terrorist minority which is mostly Jewish—all this speaks another language, a language which the world cannot listen to permanently because it rings with the story of nameless suffering and indescribable hardships borne by a nation of a hundred-and-sixty million people.

The fact that, in order to carry out its aims, Bolshevism uses propagandist methods which are perceptible only by those which have experience in such things and are entirely accepted in good faith by the average citizen makes this Terror International extraordinarily dangerous for other states and peoples. This propaganda starts out from the principle that the end sanctifies the means, that lies and slander, the terrorising of the individual and of the mass, robbery and burnings and strikes and insurrection, espionage and sabotage of armies can and ought to be made use of, and therewith that the aim of revolutionising the whole world must be specially and solely kept in view. This extraordinarily pernicious method of influencing the masses of the people does not stop before anything or anybody. Those alone are competent to deal with it who see into its secret driving forces and are capable of adopting the necessary contrary measures. This propaganda understands how to adopt every instrument to its purpose. It takes on an intellectual shape in intellectual circles. It is bourgeois with the bourgeoisie and proletarian with the proletariat. It is mild and passive where that attitude suits and it is pugnacious wherever it meets opposition that needs to be suppressed.

Bolshevism carries on its International propaganda through the Komintern.

A few weeks ago this apparatus for world destruction made public to the whole of Europe its plan of campaign for the annihilation of the nations and the states, all arranged and set forth in its tactical and strategical elements. Yet the bourgeois world, whose extirpation was announced openly and without any reserve whatsoever, failed to make any public protest of indignation and unite all the forces at its command as a definite counter-defence.

The cry of warning was raised only by those states in which Bolshevism has been finally overcome through the restoration of national principles. But this cry of warning was laughed at by the threatened bourgeois world and set aside as an exaggerated alarm.

Swept clear of internal enemies and united under the National Socialist standard, Germany placed herself at the head of the groups marshalled in the fight against the international bolshevisation of the world. Herein she is quite aware that she is fulfilling a world mission which reaches out beyond all national frontiers. On the successful issue of this mission depends the fate of our civilised nations. As National Socialists, we have seen Bolshevism through and through. We recognise it beneath all its masks and camouflages. It stands before us derobed of its trappings, bare and naked in its whole miserable imposture. We know what its teachings are, but we know also what it is in practice.

Here I shall give an unvarnished picture, which is backed up in all particulars by incontestable facts. If there is a spark of reason left in the world, and the faculty for clear thinking, then the states and peoples must be shocked at the prospect and induced to come together for their common defence against this acute danger.

I leave the methods and practices of the Communist Propaganda and theory within and without Russia to speak through examples which appear to me to be symptomatic. These examples could be replaced and supplemented by thousands of others, all of which when taken together show up the terrible aspect of this world disease.

Murder of individuals, murder of hostages and mass murder are the favourite means applied by Bolshevism to get rid of all opposition to its propaganda.

In Germany three hundred National Socialists fell victims to the Communist terror practised on individuals. On the 14th January 1930, Horst Wessel was shot through the half-opened door of his house by the Communist, Alberecht Hohler-called Ali-his accessories being the Jews, Salli Eppestein and Else Cohn. On the 9th of August 1931, the police captains, Anlauf and Lenck, were shot down in the Bülowplatz in Berlin. The Communist leaders, Heinz Neumann and Kippenberger, were accused as instigators of the murder. Shortly afterwards Heinz Neumann was arrested in Switzerland because of a passport which was invalid and a request for extradition made by Germany was not granted, on the plea that it was a “political crime.” These are only some single examples of the communist terror wreaked on individuals. As further instances of the blood lust and cruelty to which they bear evidence we may turn to the hostage murders which took place in previous years.

On April 30th 1919, in the Courtyard of the Luitpold Gymnasium, in Münich, ten hostages, among them a woman, were shot through the backs, their bodies rendered unrecognisable and taken away. This act was done at the order of the Communist Terrorist, Eglhofer, and under the responsibility of the Jewish Soviet Commissaries, Levien, Levien-Nissen and Axelrod. In 1919, during the Bolshevic regime of the Jew, Bela Kun, whose real name was Aron Cohn, in Budapest twenty hostages were murdered. During the October Revolution in Spain eight prisoners were shot at Ovièdo, seventeen in Turon; and in the barracks at Pelàno, to protect a communist attack, thirty-eight prisoners were placed at the head of the insurgents and some of them shot. At the Komintern Congress, on July 31st, 1935, the communist leader, Carcio, expressly declared that this revolution was carried through “under the leadership of the communists.”

This list of bloodshed becomes all the more fearful and horrible when we add to it the apparently incredible number of mass murders carried out by the Communists. As a classical prototype of this, we have the Paris Commune of the year 1871, which was passionately celebrated by Karl Marx and is approved today by modern Soviets as the model of the Bolshevic World Revolution. The number of victims who fell in that terrible year 1871 can no longer be ascertained. The Jewish Tschekist, Bela Kun, made an experiment which rivalled the Paris Commune in bloodshed when he ordered the execution of 60,000 to 70,000 people in the Crimea. For the most part, these executions were carried out with machine-guns. At the Municipal Hospital in Alupka, 272 sick and wounded were brought out on stretchers in front of the gate of the Institution and there shot. The truth of this has been officially confirmed in the report made to the Geneva Red Cross. During the 133 days of his Terror Rule in Hungary the Jew, Bela Kun, had innumerable men murdered. The names of 570 of those have been given in official documents. In November 1934, the Chinese Marshal, Tschiangkaischek, made public the information that in the province of Kiangsi one million people were murdered by the communists and six millions robbed of all their possessions. All these blood-stained and horror-raising events have reached a climax in the mass murders committed throughout Soviet Russia.

According to returns given by the Soviets themselves and taking reliable sources into account, the number of persons executed within the first 5 years of Soviet rule must be placed at about 1,860,000, in round numbers. Of these, 6,000 were teachers and professors, 8,800 were doctors of medicine, 54,000 were army officers, 260,000 soldiers, 105,000 police officials, 49,000 gendarmes, 12,800 civil servants, 355,000 persons of the upper classes, 192,000 workers, 815,000 peasants.

The Soviet statistician, Oganowsky, estimates the number of persons who died of hunger in the years 1921/1922 at 5,200,000. The Austrian Cardinal-Archbishop, Monsignor Innitzer, said in his appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union. During his speech delivered before the House of Lords on the 25th of July, 1934, the Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking on reports relative to the famine victims in Soviet Russia in 1933, said that the number was nearer to six than three millions.

We have thus before our eyes a full picture of this fearful and harrowing mass terrorisation which is only approximately paralleled by even the most blood-curdling examples of war or revolution that are recorded in the history of the world. This is the actual system of bloodshed and terror and death which is carried out by hysterical and criminal political maniacs who would have it copied in every country and among every people with the same terrorizing practices, in so far as they might find the possibility of doing so.

In view of all this, it would be idle to bring forward proofs of the spirit of discipline and generous consideration which the National Socialists showed in carrying through their revolutionary aims.

Such is “the strange and terrible” resemblance between the methods followed by the two regimes which the writer of the article in the English newspaper alleges to be similar in “essential structure.” But the facts to which I have referred do not fill out the picture. Revolutions cost money. Propaganda campaigns throughout the world must be financed. Bolshevism procures the means of doing so after its own fashion.

In the summer of 1907 Stalin led the notorious bomb attack at Tiflis on a money transport from the State Bank. Thirty persons fell victims to the attack. The 250,000 roubles which were robbed from the transport, were sent to Lenin, who was then in Switzerland. They were to be at his disposal for revolutionary purposes. On the 17th of January 1908 the Jew, Wallack-Meer, who now goes by the name of Litwinow and has been Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, was arrested in Paris in connection with the bombing and robbing of the transport at Tiflis.

The Communist Party in Germany organised and led the plunder expeditions there and also the robbery of explosives from official depots. The list of such cases brought before the Courts of the Reich is very long. In this list are thirty crimes described as major and extreme cases. To them must be added the burnings and bombings organised and perpetrated without any consideration whatsoever for the lives of innocent persons.

On the 16th April 1925, there was an explosion in the Cathedral of Sophia, which had been organised and carried out by the Bolshevics. In July 1927 the Communists set the Palais de Justice at Vienna on fire. To celebrate the Lenin Feast, on 22nd January 1930, the Simonoff Monastery at Moscow, a building dating from the 14th century, was blown up. On the night of 27th/28th February 1933 the Reichstag in Berlin was set on fire as a signal for the armed communist rising. Through the medium of strikes, street fights and armed risings, the first preparatory stage of the Bolshevic revolution is meant to be effected. The methods used are the same in all countries. A long series of revolutionary acts which might be added on all sides furnish a striking witness of this. In one of its propagandist publications, the Komintern boasted that it had organised nearly all the strikes which have taken place during recent years. These strikes find their violent sequel in street fights. From the street fight to the armed rising is but one step. In this sequence, the following risings took place: October 1917 in Russia, January 1919 the Spartacus rising in Germany, 1920 the Max Hoelz revolt in Vogtland, and the Red Army in the Ruhr district, 1921 in Central Germany, September 1923 at Hamburg, December 1924 at Reval, on the 23rd October 1926, 22nd February 1927 and 21st March 1927 at Shanghai. December 1927 in Canton, October 1934 in Spain, April 1935 in Cuba and May 1935 in the Philippines.

Bolshevic propaganda aims its chief blows against the armed forces of a country; because the Bolshevics know that if they were to adopt the principle of trying to secure support from the majority of the people they could never carry out their plans. Force, therefore, is the only means left to them; but in every well-ordered state this meets with the opposition of the army. The Bolshevics accordingly feel bound to introduce their disintegrating propaganda within the ranks of the army itself. Their idea is to corrupt it from within and thus render it ineffective as a bulwark against anarchy.

Before the advent of National Socialism to power in Germany there was the closest cooperation between the Soviet espionage and the Communist organisations here. A foreign department of the O.G.P.U. operated offically in our country. It was the special representative and directive agent of the Communist espionage. The aim of this espionage was not only to obtain military secrets in a traitorous way, but also to carry on a system of sabotage among the police and the army. Part of the programme was to introduce a mutinous spirit into the Reichswehr and by an increasing work of revolutionary instruction to bring about a revolt of the soldiers and sailors in the German defence forces. From July 1931 to December 1932 one-hundred-and-eleven cases of high treason were dealt with before the German Courts. These cases originated with the activities of the Communist Party. Furthermore, there was an extraordinary number of cases of espionage of a treasonable character in the industrial factories. The most boorish example of the interference of “Soviet Diplomats” for the purpose of creating domestic political trouble in another country is afforded by the Jewish Soviet Ambassador, Joffe, who had to leave Berlin on the 6th November 1918, because he had utilized the diplomatic courier to transport sabotage material which was to be used to undermine the German army and make the revolution possible. What were called “Revolution Funds” were used in great part by Liebknecht for the purchase of weapons for the German Communists, and partly also for the production of propaganda material to be used among the army. On the 26th December 1918, one of the Socialists members of the Reichstag, the Jew, Dr. Oskar Cohn, declared that on the 5th of the previous month, he had received 4 million roubles from Joffe for the purpose of the German Revolution.

We can now see that all these activities were meant for the purpose of bringing about the downfall of the German Reich through the undermining and corruption of the German Army.

Amid all these single acts of terror, of hostage murders and mass murders, plunder and arson, strikes and armed risings, espionage and sabotage of armies, we see the Communist World Propaganda showing its forbidding and grimacing countenance. An idea and a movement which has used such dastardly and revolting means to secure power and to hold it can maintain itself only by chicanery, slander and falsehood. These are the typical methods used by Bolshevism in its propaganda; and they are applied in different ways according to the suitability of the occasion. Thus, for example, we can understand how it is that crises, catastophes etc. which happen in other countries outside the Soviet Union are exploited by the Bolshevic Propaganda, whereas we are told that within the Soviet frontiers a work of social construction is in progress that has banished economic distress and created a State in which there is no unemployment. The real truth is that a condition of commercial disorder exists throughout the country and an industrial collapse which baffles description. The “Land without Unemployment” contains hundreds of thousands and even millions of beggars and homeless children who throng the streets of the big cities, and hundreds of thousands who are condemned to banishment and forced labour.

While in all the other countries alleged Capitalist and Fascist dictatorships are in power, Russia affords an example of freedom and democratic order. So we are told.

In reality this land is wilting under the Jewish-Marxist rule of force, which will stop at no means to maintain itself in power. The pretended freedom and right of self-determination among the nationalities constituting the Soviet Union turns out in fact to be a process of enslavement and extirpation of those nationalities themselves. The pretended liberation of colonial and semi-colonial peoples through the international proletariat is, when looked at in its true light, a blood-stained and ruthless example of Soviet Imperialism of the worst kind.

In Germany itself, before our advent to power, the pronouncements of the Communist Party varied unscrupulously according to the condition of the times. At first Germany was “a semi-colonial sacrifice to the Versailles Powers and was held down through the League of Nations.” But when the National Socialist movement began to make headway among the German public, the Communist Party put forth a programme of “social and national liberation.” Then they proclaimed a proletariat confederacy between Berlin and Moscow and against Versailles and the League of Nations. Today a military pact has been made with Paris and Prague and the Soviets have entered the hitherto defamed League of Nations, which used to be known as “The Robber League.”

The so-called peace policy of the Soviet Union practically shows itself in world-revolutionary intrigues among the other countries, in unscrupulous stirring-up of conflicts between the various states, while at the same time it is arming at a fantastic rate in preparation for a war of aggression. People in West-European countries talk of a social order without class distinction; but in Russia itself, there is a violent differentiation between the privileged and dispossessed castes. The Soviet propaganda speaks of “a paradise of children that contains the happiest youth in the world.”

The real state of the case however shows us millions of unsupported children, the existence of child labour and even the death penalty for children. Bolshevic propaganda deceitfully talks of the “emancipation of woman through communism“. The truth is that the institution of marriage has been completely set aside, that there is a terrible disintegration and abolition of family life, that there is an absence of employment for women and a state of prostitution that is alarmingly on the increase.

Such a regime, in which theory and practice are in glaring contradiction, cannot possibly maintain its position except by the propagation of falsehood and unscrupulous hypocrisy.

Before the 30th January, 1933, each time that a workman was murdered by order of the Communists the crime was imputed to the National Socialists. There were constant false reports of mutinies among the Storm Troops and honest German workmen were branded as strike-breakers. When Horst Wessel was assassinated the public horror became so great that the Communists had to bow before it; and, to clear themselves, they put forward the story that this dastardly political misdeed arose from an altercation between rival claimants to a mistress. When Norkus, who was a member of the Hitler Youth, was stabbed by some communist brutes the “Rote Fahne” barefacedly declared that Norkus was killed by a Nazi spy; so that the Nazis were alleged to have murdered a seventeen-year-old member of their own party in order to procure material to have the German Communist Party forbidden by law. The same happened when Maikowski and Gatschke were assassinated.

When National Socialism showed up the work of the Communist Party in Germany the Communist International started the propagandist atrocity stories against National Socialism. The London mock trial was meant to acquit the Communist Party of any guilt of burning the Reichstag by claiming that it had been supported and approved by leading National Socialists. The dead member of the Reichstag could not deny what had been falsely attributed to him. Later on, however, avowals were made by people who had formerly been communist leaders, that not a single word of the truth was contained in the memorandum. The whole thing was avowed by them to have been falsified in all its details for the purpose of bringing National Socialism into discredit before the world. Jurists and journalists of repute, and even an English Lord, descended to the level of making marionettes of themselves at this London mock trial.

Since that time the communists have been carrying on a world-wide systematic work of propaganda against Germany, because they recognise and realise that the National Socialists are their most dangerous enemies. Among the eternally recurring themes of this communist agitation are the stories of war preparations in the interests of German imperialism, preparations for a revanche against France, annexations in Denmark and Holland and Switzerland, in the Baltic States and the Ukraine etc. and a German crusade against the Soviet Union, dissensions in the Party and the Government, especially between the Party and the Army, growing discontent among the masses, assassinations of leading men in Germany or attempts on their lives, preparations for an inflation and the coming of a complete economic collapse, the murder and torturing of prisoners, religious presecutions and cultural vandelisms of all kinds.

These propagandist falsehoods are sent out through thousands of channels and in thousands of ways, boureois intellectualism-sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously-is pressed into the service of this campaign of defamation. In all European capitals there are large offices for the spread of this poison throughout the world and large subsidies are furnished by the Komintern to prepare and carry out the work. These organisations are constant centres of unrest among the nations. They never tire of stirring up trouble every way they possibly can.

That is Bolshevic propaganda. That is the form in which it clothes itself and lives, using falsehood and slander and chicanery, so as to make the nations suspicious of one another and hate one another, thus spreading a general spirit of unrest; because the Bolshevics know so well that they can never bring the communist idea to triumph except in an age that is distracted and sceptical.

In Germany we have religious controversies which arise from profound questions of conscience but have nothing whatsoever to do with a denial of religion. These controversies are exploited sometimes by harmless and sometimes malicious critics and a parallel is drawn between them and the absolutely dogmatic atheism of the Bolshevic International. To realise the grotesqueness of the parallel it is only necessary to point to a few examples in the theory and practice of Communism.

In the programme of the Communist International it is openly and freely declared that the struggle against every kind of religion must be carried on ruthlessly and systematically. Lenin declared that “religion is the opium of the people and it is a species of fusel oil.” These statements are published in the fourth volume of his “Works.”

At the second Congress of Atheists, Bucharin declared that religion must be “destroyed with the bayonet.” The Jew, Gubermann, who, under the name of Jaroslawski, is the leader of the Association of Militant Atheists in the Soviet Union, has made the following declaration: “It is our duty to destroy every religious world-concept... If the destruction of ten million human beings, as happened in the last war, should be necessary for the triumph of one definite class, then that must be done and it will be done.”

In its issue of 6th November 1930 The Atheist, the monthly periodical which is the central organ of the Association of Militant Atheists, wrote the following: “We shall burn down all the churches of the world and raze all the prisons to the ground.” In all educational establishments throughout the Soviet Union religious instruction is forbidden and in its place there has been introduced a systematic instructional course in Marxist atheism. Children under the age of 18 are forbidden to take part in religious services and prayers. The Church Law of the 8th April 1929 has established a situation in which spiritual and religious communities are deprived of all rights. All the clergy and their families belong to the dispossessed class of Soviet citizens, thus automatically losing their right to work or earn their livelihood, and they are liable to be removed from their domicile at any time whatsoever.

Such is the theory and world concept of the juridical principles underlying Bolshevic atheism, and such principles are accordingly carried out in practice.

Up to 1930, 31 bishops, 1,600 clergy and 7,000 monks were murdered under the Soviet regime. According to statistics available for 1930, there were then confined in prisons, under starvation conditions, 48 bishops, 3,700 clergy and 8,000 monks and nuns. The “International League against the Third International” at Geneva issued statistics on August 6th 1935, showing that in Russia 40,000 priests had been arrested, banished or murdered. Nearly all the Orthodox churches and chapels have been either destroyed or else closed to religious worship and converted into clubs, cinemas, barns etc. Prior to our advent to power, the atheist propaganda carried out by the Marxists in Germany, whose forces we have overthrown, took its stand in favour of the dreadful state of things which I have described. The Social Democratic “League of Geman Freethinkers” alone had a membership of 600,000. The Communist “League of Proletarian Freethinkers” had close on 160,000 members. Almost without exception, the intellectual leaders of Marxist atheism in Germany were Jews, among them being Erich Weinert, Felix Abraham, Dr. Levy-Lenz and others. At regular meetings, held in the presence of a notary public, members were requested to register their declaration of withdrawal from their church for a fee of 2 Marks. And thus the fight for atheism was carried on. Between 1918 and 1933 the withdrawals from the German Evangelical Churches alone amounted to two-and-a-half million persons in Germany. The programme which these atheistic societies laid down in regard to sexual matters is amply characterised in the following demands publicly expressed at meetings and distributed in leaflet form:

1. The complete abrogation of those paragraphs of the law dealing with the crime of abortion, and the right to have abortion procured free of charge in State Hospitals.

2. Non-interference with prostitution.

3. The abrogation of all bourgeois-capitalistic regulations in regard to marriage and divorce.

4. Official registration to be optional and the children to be educated by the community.

5. Abrogation of all penalties for sexual perversities and amnesty to be granted to all persons condemned as “sexual criminals.”

Truly a case of methodical insanity, which has for its aim the wilful destruction of the nations and their civilization and the substitution of barbarism as a fundamental principle of public life.

Where are the men behind the scenes of this virulent world movement? Who are the inventors of all this madness? Who transplanted this ensemble into Russia and is today making the attempt to have it prevail in other countries? The answer to these questions discloses the actual secret of our anti-Jewish policy and our uncompromising fight against Jewry; for the Bolshevic International is in reality nothing less than a Jewish International.

It was the Jew who discovered Marxism. It is the Jew who for decades past has endeavoured to stir up world revolutions through the medium of Marxism. It is the Jew who is today at the head of Marxism in all the countries of the world. Only in the brain of a nomad who is without nation, race and country could this satanism have been hatched. And only one possessed of a satanic malevolence could launch this revolutionary attack. For Bolshevism is nothing less than brutal materialism speculating on the baser instincts of mankind. And in its fight against West European civilisation it makes use of the lowest human passions in the interests of International Jewry.

The theory underlying this political and economic fanaticism was excogitated by a Jew named Karl Mordechai, alias Marx, the son of a Rabbi in Treves. A variant of the same theory sprang from the brain of another Jew called Ferdinand Lassalle. He was the son of the Jewish Chaim Wolfsohn from Loslau, who changed his name first to Losslauer and then to Lasel and finally to Lassalle. The Labour Minister of the Paris Commune was the Jew, Leo Fraenkel. The Jewish terrorist, Karl Cohen, was the friend of Marx. On the 7th May 1866, in Unter den Linden, Berlin, this Cohen made two attempts to murder Bismarck by shooting at him.

In Pre-war days the editorial staff of the “Vorwaerts”, the German Socialist organ, already employed 15 Jews, the majority of whom subsequently became leaders of Communism in Germany. Among these were Kurt Eisner, Rudolf Hilferding, and Rosa Luxemberg. During the Great War the Polish Jews, Leo Joggisches and Rosa Luxemberg, were at the head of the driving forces intent on bringing about Germany’s military downfall and the subsequent world revolution. Another Jew-Hugo Haase-subsequently chairman of the U.S.P.D. (Independent German Socialist Party) demanded the refusal of war credits on August 4th 1914.

On the 10th November 1918, there was formed the “Council of Six Representatives of the People” which included the Jews Hasse and Landsberg. On the 16th December 1918, was held the first meeting of the “General Congress of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet of German.”. In this congress the Jews, Cohen-Reuss and Hilferding, were the principal speakers. The armed forces of Germany were represented by the Jew Hodenberg, for the VIII Army, the Jew Levinsohn, for the IV, the Jew Siegfried Marck for the Army Dept. A, Nathan Moses for Dept. B. Jacob Riesenfeld represented the Army group of Kiew and Otto Rosenberg represented the Army group of Kassel.

The first Communist Party Congress was held in Berlin on the 31st December 1918, at which the Jewess Rosa Luxemburg was elected leader. The Reich Conference of the Spartacus movement, held on the 29th December 1918, was formally opened by the official representative of the Soviet Union, a Jew named Karl Radek Sobelsohn, whilst Rosa Luxemburg appeared as one of the official speakers.

On the night between the 6th and 7th April 1919, after the removal of the Jew Eisner in Munich, the Soviet Republic was proclaimed there. The leading part in this was taken by the Jews Landauer, Toller, Lipp, Erich Muehsam and Wadler. On the 14th April 1919, a second Soviet Government was formed in Munich, with the Jews Leviné-Nissen, Levien and Toller

at its head. The Press of the German Communist Party in Berlin was controlled by the Jews Meyer, Thalheimer, Scholem, Friedlaender etc. The lawyers who functioned on behalf of the German Communist Party were the Jews Litten, Rosenfeld, Joachim, Apfel, Landsberg etc. The well known Bolshevic Jew Raffes, writes: “The hatred of Czarism against the Jews was justified; because from the ’sixties onwards in all the revolutionary parties the Government had to deal with the Jews as the most active members.”

At the second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party of Russia, in 1903, the split occurred which divided the party into Bolshevics and Menshevics. In the one as well as in the other of these parties the authoritative positions were held by Jews. These were as follows:

In the Menshevics: Martor (Zederbaum), Trotzki (Bronstein), Dan (Gurwitsch), Martynow, Liber (Goldmann), Abramowitsch (Rein), Goreff (Goldmann) etc.

In the Bolshevics: Borodin (Grusenberg)-subsequently Leader of the bolshevic Revolutionary movement in China, at present Bolshevic Commissary in Mongolia. Frumkin, Hanecki (Fuerstenberg), Jaroslawski (Gubelmann)-Leader of the atheist movement in the Soviet Union and throughout the world, Kamenew (Rosenfeld), Laschéwitsch, Litwinow (Wallach),-at present Foreign Soviet Commissary and formerly Chairman of the League of Nations, Ljadow (Mandelstamm), Radek (Sobelsohn), Sinowjew - 1919 to 1926 leader of the Communist International, Sokolnikow (Brilliant), Swerdlow-close friend and co-worker of Lenin.

In the beginning of August 1917, the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevic Party was opened. The presiding committee was made up of 3 Russians, 6 Jews and 1 Georgian. On the 23rd October 1917 the historic session of Z.K. (Central Committee) was held. Here the armed revolt was decided upon. For the purpose of taking over the leadership of the revolt a “Political Bureau” and a “War Revolutionary Centre” were established. These political and military centres of the Bolshevic Revolution were made up of 2 Russians, 6 Jews, 1 Georgian and 1 Pole.

In the English “Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia”, which was presented to Parliament in April 1919, by Command of His Majesty, Report No. 6 contains the following: A telegram from Sir M. Findlay to Mr. Balfour (received on 18th September 1918):

“Following is report by Netherlands Minister at Petrograd, 6th September, received here today, on the situation in Russia, in particular as affecting British subjects and British interests under Minister’s protection: . . .

“At Moscow I had repeated interviews with Chicherin and Karahan. Whole Soviet Government was sunk to the level of a criminal organisation. Bolshevics realize that their game is up, and have entered upon a career of criminal madness. . .

“The danger is now so great that I feel it my duty to call the attention of the British and all other Governments to the fact that if an end is not put to Bolshevism in Russia at once the civilisation of the whole world will be threatened....I consider that the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue now before the world, not even excluding the War, which is still raging and unless, as above stated Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organised and worked by Jews who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. The only manner in which this danger could be averted would be a collective action on the part of all Powers.”

On the 13th November 1934 the newspaper The Moment, which is brought out at Warsaw and is one of the East European leading Jewish journals, published an article (In No. 260B) which was entitled “Laser Moisséjewitsch Kaganowitsch” (Stalin’s deputy and right-hand man). The article states: “He is a great man, this Laser Moisséjewitsch-he will one day rule over the country of the Czars... His daughter, who will soon be 21, is now Stalin’s wife. . . and he is good to the Jews - Laser Moisséjewitsch. You see, it is good to have a man in one of the key positions.”

Of the so most authoritative functionaries from the Party and State in the highest councils of the U.S.S.R. we find that more than 20 are Jews and only 17 Russians, whereas the percentage of Jews to the whole population of the U.S.S.R. is only 1.8.

The People’s Commissary for the Interior (formerly Tscheka or O.G.P.U.) is the Jew Jagoda. In the Communist International (the “General Staff of the World Revolution”)-the Jew Pjatnitzki plays the most important role.

The leadership of the Bolshevic revolutionary movement in all countries lay and still lies in Jewish hands. In some countries, such as Poland and Hungary, they are in exclusive control of this movement.

In the trial against the Jewish communist Schmelz in March 1935, the Polish Police Commissioner Landèbzrski declared as witness that 98% of those arrested in Poland on charges of communistic intrigues were Jews.

The actual leader in the movement for the Bolshevisation of China is the Jew Borodin-Grusenberg.

Therewith we may close the account.

That is Communism with the mask off. That is its theory, its practice and its propaganda. I have given a bald and staid account of facts which have been gathered mostly from official sources; but this account points to a state of affairs which is so terrible and revolting in all its effects that it must shock the average civilised human being. This gospel of “the emancipation of the proletariat from the yoke of capitalism” is the worst and most brutal kind of capitalism that can be imagined. It has been thought out, set afoot and led under the inspiration of the Mammon worship and materialist thought which is incarnated in international Jewry, scattered throughout every country of the globe. It is no social experiment. It is nothing else than a mammoth system for the expropriation and despoiling of the Aryan directive classes in all the nations, and the substitution of the Jewish underworld in their place. Those people who put themselves forward here as the apostles of a new teaching and the liberators of mankind are in reality figures that herald anarchy and chaos for the civilised world.

There is no longer any political question at issue here. This thing cannot be judged or estimated by political rules or principles. It is iniquity under a political mask. It is not something to be brought before the bar of world history but rather something that has to be dealt with by the judicial administration of each country. It must be met with the same ruthless and even brutal means with which it strives to usurp power or hold power in its hands. Here there can be no barganing; because the danger that threatens Europe is acute. Overnight it might break in among the civilised nations of the world and spread universal catastrophe. Those States that make peace with it will soon learn from experience that it is not they who will tame Bolshevism but that Bolshevism will bring them under its heel. It cannot be said that the Komintern has changed its practices. It is and remains what it always was-the propagandist and revolutionary machinery which is avowedly intended to bring about the downfall of the West.

Bolshevism is the declared enemy of all nations and of all religions and of all human civilisation. The World Revolution is now, as always, its acknowledged and proclaimed goal. Stalin himself has said, as the organ of the War Commissariat, “The Red Star”, in January 1935, triumphantly announced: “Under Lenin’s banner, in the proletarian revolution, we shall triumph over the whole world.” And the communist emigrant, Pieck, said at the Seventh World Congress of the Komintern, held on the 28th July this year: “The triumph of Socialism in Soviet Russia proves at the same time that the triumph of Socialism throughout the whole world is inevitable.” On the day before the Congress was held, “L’Humanité” (the organ of the French Communists) greeted it with the outburst: “Long live the Komintern, the General Staff of the World Revolution.”

Traffic with Bolshevism is not possible either on a political basis or on the basis of general principles in life. The acknowledgement of the Soviet Union on the part of the United States has given rise to an increase in communist propaganda, innumerable strikes and general unrest throughout America. The military pact between France and the Soviet Union led shortly afterwards to an increase of communist votes at the municipal elections, in which they won 43 mandates and thus doubled the number of mandates formerly held by them, while all the other parties lost accordingly. The military alliance between Czecho-Slovakia and the Soviet Union led to sabotaging in the army and to an unexpected increase of communist votes at the elections which followed.

Whoever has made pacts with Bolshevism will have reason to rue his act.

Nothing could be farther from our minds than the wish to prescribe for other nations and their governments or even to counsel them. We do not mix up in their domestic affairs. We only see the dangers that threaten Europe and we raise our voices in warning, so that the magnitude of those dangers may be recognised.

As far as we ourselves are concerned, we have completely overcome this menace. Indeed perhaps, outside of his work in Germany, the greatest service which our Führer has rendered the world is that here in Germany he has set up a barrier against world Bolshevism against which the waves of this vile Asiatic-Jewish flood break in vain. He has taught us not only to recognise Bolshevism as the world’s greatest enemy but also to meet it face to face and crush it. Instead of this teaching he has supplied a new and better and nobler ideal for the liberation of a whole nation. In the Sign of this Idea we have fought our battles and brought our banners to victory. This ideal has enabled us to free Germany from the menace of Bolshevism and banish it once and for all from the German nation. Today we know how to cope with these insidious forces.

The nation has been rendered immune against the poison of the red anarchy. It has repudiated the false and hollow catch-words of the communistic world propaganda. Seriously and industriously and with patience and discipline it has given itself to the solution of problems which arise out of its own destiny. History will one day give due credit to the Führer for having saved Germany from the most acute and deadly peril by overthrowing Bolshevism and thereby saving the whole civilisation of the West from the abyss that yawned before it.

I hope that it will not be left to posterity to recognise the greatness of this historic mission, but that it will acknowledged by our contemporaries and that they will decide to act upon the truth of its teachings. As the true and loyal Old Guard of the Führer and the Party, we rejoice that we are standing under his banners in this most decisive struggle that the history of the world has experienced.


The following note is appended to the end of Goebbels’ speech:

“In the famine spring that is now coming in, shall similar events recur as those which took place in the year 1933, when numberless innocent people in the Ukraine, the Volga district, in the Northern Caucasus and other areas perished of hunger?

“The undersigned organisations have until now taken up the position that questions of humanity and provision for relief ought to be considered independently of political and social interests. They consider it a duty of the most elementary human and purely charitable nature not to remain silent about these conditions but to allow the voice of conscience speak again. For the sake of the starving and dying people, and to avoid a catastrophe such as that of 1933, they demand that the situation should be made entirely clear and that the necessary provision for relief should be assured.”

The signatory organisations are:-

The Interdenominational and International Relief Committee for the Hunger Areas in the Soviet Union, the Interdenominational and International Russian Relief Work of the European Headquarters for Church Relief Action, and The Jewish Russian Relief.

Such are the authorities to which Dr. Goebbels refers in speaking of the famine conditions which exist in Russia under the Bolshevic regime.


Go to the 1933-1945 Page.

Go to the German Propaganda Archive Home Page.


FIFTY YEARS AGO 
MARX AND ENGELS AND THE ‘COLLAPSE’ OF CAPITALISM

In 1786, three years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf wrote:

“The majority is always on the side of routine and immobility, so much is it unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic . . . Those who do not want to move forward are the enemies of those who do, and unhappily it is the mass which persists stubbornly in never budging at all.”

The events of 1789 disproved his gloomy predictions but, by the time Babeuf became prominent, the reaction was already setting in. His slogan of “The revolution is not finished, because the rich absorb ail wealth and rule exclusively, while the poor work like veritable slaves, languishing in poverty and counting for nothing in the State” was not taken up by the peasants and artisans. Faced with this, Babeuf and his followers planned an insurrection in which they would seize power, constitute themselves as the ‘Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety’, crush all opposition and — only then — introduce democracy. It was this method of conspiracy and coup d’etat which became the standard technique for 19th-century insurrectionaries such as Blanqui and which formed the inspiration for their innumerable secret societies and abortive rebellions.

From the start, Marx and Engels were scathing about this concept of revolution. For them it was self-evident that “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself” and that, in any case, “revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily” as the plotters imagined.

“It goes without saying that these conspirators by no means confine themselves to organising the revolutionary proletariat. Their business consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary development, spurring it in to artificial crises, making revolutions extempore without the conditions for revolution. For them the only condition required for the revolution is a sufficient organisation of their own conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution.”

Yet, however devastating the attack which Marx might make on the Blanquists and others, in one aspect he and Engels were in a very weak position. If they maintained that it was the entire working class which would be responsible for establishing socialism, how would they square this with the obvious fact that the mass of workers still gave every sign of being as “unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic” as they had been in Babeuf’s time? To counter this, Marx and Engels fell back on the theory that it was the crisis in capitalist production which would galvanise the masses into revolutionary activity.

Even in their earliest writings both Marx and Engels attached great importance to crises: but over the years their observations caused them to modify their ideas, especially in relation to the business cycle. In his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbucher. 1844) Engels mentioned that slumps occur every five to seven years, “just as regularly as the great plagues did in the past”. He repeated this in Principles of Communism (1847) while, in theCondition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), there are references to five-year and five to six-year cycles. Marx held similar views during this period. for in an Address on Free Trade delivered in Brussels in 1848 he drew attention to “the average period of from six to seven years — a period of time during which modern industry passes through the various phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation, crisis and completes its inevitable cycle”. At the same time they both expected crises to become “more frequent and more violent” Wage Labour and Capital. Marx. 1847) and “more serious and more universal” (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, Engels. 1844).

‘Ten-year cycle’

By the time Marx came to publish Capital (Volume I. 1867) he was writing that “the course characteristic of modern industry” was “a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations” — and adding that as accumulation advanced the “irregular oscillations” would follow each other more and more quickly. This perspective was echoed by Engels in most of his writings in the 1870s and early 80s as well. (See Dialectics of Nature. Anti-Dühring (1878), articles in the Labour Standard (1881), for example). Although Engels continued to put this line for some time after Marx’s death – see his letter to Kautsky, November 8 1884 – there was a new development during his last ten years in that more and more he came to maintain that an era of chronic stagnation had overwhelmed capitalism. As early as January 1884 in a letter to Bebel (January 18 1884), he wrote that “the ten-year cycle seems to have broken down” and, that same year, he made a similar point — although more hesitantly — in his Preface to Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy:

“The period of general prosperity preceding the crisis still fails to appear. If it should fail altogether, then chronic stagnation would necessarily become the normal condition of modern industry, with only insignificant fluctuations.”

From then until his death in 1895 his writings were full of references to “permanent and chronic depression” (Preface to the English edition of Capital, Volume I. 1886), to the “chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry” (Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1892) and to “chronic overproduction, depressed prices, falling or disappearing profits” (Capital, Volume III, 1894).

Parallel to this development of their ideas on the business cycle, Marx’s and Engels’ theories on the relationship between crises and revolution also went through a number of phases. As we have seen, in their early writings both held that the crises in capitalist production would become “more frequent and more violent”. But, if this is seen as an absolute tendency, it must mean that eventually capitalism will be brought to a point where it can no longer recover. At any rate, this was certainly Engels’ interpretation of the trends taking place in the 1840s and he repeatedly implied that crises would produce a revolution independently of the level of socialist consciousness reached by the working class:

“Every new crisis must be more serious and more universal than the last. Every fresh slump must ruin more small capitalists and increase the workers who live only by their labour. This will increase the number of the unemployed and this is the main problem that worries economists. In the end commercial crises will lead to a social revolution far beyond the comprehension of the economists with their scholastic wisdom.” (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844.)

“The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution: but it can be made more gentle than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. This depends, however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery.” (Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845).

Thus, although the extent to which socialist ideas had penetrated the working class might be important in influencing the revolution which Engels thought he saw emerging in England, that was the limit of their role. In both these works, it is the increase in misery of the workers which Engels stresses as the vital factor in the development of their revolutionary activity — rather than their growing understanding of socialism as an alternative method of organising society to capitalism. This contrasts sharply with some of Marx’s writings of the same period, where he puts all his emphasis on the spread of socialist concepts among the working class:

“It is true that, in its economic development, private property advances towards its own dissolution; but it only does this through a development which is independent of itself, unconscious and achieved against its will — solely because it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty conscious of its moral and physical poverty, degradation conscious of its degradation, and for this reason trying to abolish itself.” (Holy Family, 1845.)

In fact, socialist consciousness was considered of such vital importance by Marx that he grossly exaggerated its depth and extent

“There is no need to dwell here upon the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historical task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.” [In 1845!]

The upheavals in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe in 1848, however, had a profound influence on Marx, and for a time at any rate his enthusiasm got the better of him and he was evidently prepared to suspend his former commitment to socialist consciousness. His writings of this period suggest that it is the commercial crisis and the resulting hardship of the workers which are the critical factors in inducing the working class to turn to revolution. The articles he wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850 all revolve around the axiom that “crises produce revolution”, and since the revolutionary tide had by then ebbed away, that “a new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis”. Naturally, Engels’ earlier ideas readily accommodated themselves to this new development in Marx’s thought and together they wrote:

“With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with each other.”

This was the line they were to take throughout the 1850s. Living in exile in London and Manchester, they anxiously searched for any signs of the next crisis — and oscillated between wild optimism and more justified impatience in time with the fluctuations in world trade. In September 1852 Engels is writing to Marx that “with the temporary prosperity … the workers (in France) seem to have become completely bourgeois after all. It will take a severe chastisement by crises if they are to become good for anything again soon.” By April 1853, however: “Europe is admirably prepared; it needs only the spark of a crisis”. (Engels to Weydemeyer). When the required spark didn’t materialise he became more cautious but in 1857, when a crisis really did develop, they were both certain that “now our time is coming”. As early as September 1856, Marx had recognised the symptoms of the approaching disruption in industry and had written to Engels: “This time, moreover, the thing is on a European scale never reached before and I do not think we shall be able to sit here as spectators much longer”. The following year, in the midst of the crisis, he is “working like mad all through the nights at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes.” (Letter to Engels, December 8, 1857). Meanwhile Engels was maintaining that a really chronic crisis would be needed to stir the workers into revolution since “the masses must have got damned lethargic after such long prosperity” (Engels to Marx, November 15, 1857). When trade started to pick up again at the end of December 1857 both of them were sadly disappointed and, a year later, we find Engels returning to a familiar theme: “The English proletariat is ‘becoming more and more bourgeois”.

The crisis of 1857 and its failure to evoke a revolutionary response from the working class had a big impact on Marx. So when he came to publish Capital (Volume I, 1867), although he outlined the cycle of modern industry as “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and stagnation”, there were no references to revolution automatically arising from this sequence. But if Marx seems to have largely shaken himself free of his former romantic notions, they remained well in evidence in Engel’s writings. Anti-Dühring (1878) in particular was as outspoken in its commitment to the idea that capitalism would ‘collapse’ as any of his earlier works had been.

“… this mode of production (capitalism), by virtue of its own development, drives towards the point at which it makes itself impossible.”

Anticipating Rosa Luxemburg, Engels wrote that “if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place” and that the working class would be “forced to accomplish this revolution”, “under penalty of its own destruction”. Crises, then, were still seen as “means of compelling the social revolution”.

Until the early 1880s Engels’s ideas on crises and revolution hardly showed any advance on those he had held 30 years before. This is made clear enough by a letter he wrote to Bernstein in January 1882.

“That crises are one of the most powerful levels of revolutionary upheaval was already stated in The Communist Manifesto and was treated in detail up to 1848 inclusive in the review in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where, however, it was shown too that returning prosperity also breaks revolutions and lays the basis for the victory of reaction.”

But after Marx’s death in 1883, with Engels deciding that capitalism might well be entering a phase of chronic stagnation with correspondingly less chance of acute crises occurring, his emphasis naturally shifted from the earlier concept of a crisis-provoked revolution to the view that the capitalist system would be driven into an economic impasse. Thus in his preface to the first German edition of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy (1884) he refers to “the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever greater degree”. Four years later, in his introduction to Marx’s Address on Free Trade, he writes that society will be “brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodelling of the economic structure which forms its basis”.

Engels’s correspondence during his last ten years is also an interesting record of his tendency to imagine that capitalism would ‘collapse’. In a letter to J. P. Becker in June 1885 he assessed the political currents at work in England and concluded that “the masses will turn socialist here too. Industrial over-production will do the rest”. As late as 1893, in a letter to Danielson (February 24, 1893), he is still convinced that there are “economic consequences of the capitalist system which must bring it up to the critical point”, that “the crisis must come”.

Yet although at times during this final period of his life, Engels was to foreshadow the determinism of the leaders of the Second International on this question, at others he came near to the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties. As we have shown, as long as Marx was alive, it was he rather than Engels who emphasised the need for socialist consciousness as a precondition for the overthrowing of capitalism by the working class. But with Marx dead, Engels seems to have become aware of the need to stress this himself. Although he could not free himself entirely from the ideas which had dominated his thinking on revolution for over 40 years, yet he could also write that:

“… the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed. So I should be very cautious about prophesying such a thing” (the collapse of bourgeois society). (Letter to Bebel, October 24, 1891).

When this is coupled with other statements he was to make, to the effect that “where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul” (Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, 1895), one gets an entirely different slant from that conveyed in some of his other writings.

This study of the attitude of Marx and Engels towards crises and the concept of capitalism ‘collapsing’ shows, then, the extent to which they were influenced by the various phases which capitalism passed through in 19th-century Europe. If we have outlined some of the mistaken attitudes they adopted this is not to detract from the immense contributions they made to socialist thought. What it does mean, however, is that it was left to other socialists to produce a more penetrating analysis of the role of crises in capitalist production. What was most useful in their work on this topic was later summed up in the pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse which the Socialist Party published in 1932:

“Until a sufficient number of workers are prepared to organise politically for the conscious purpose of ending capitalism, that system will stagger on indefinitely from one crisis to another.”

 SOCIALIST STANDARD no-776-april-1969

 

A Companion Party of The World Socialist Movement – Advocating socialism and nothing but since 1904


How Capitalism Kills During a Pandemic

From failing to develop a vaccine, to evicting the jobless and cutting off their health care, to needlessly subjecting workers and the public to infection: capitalism will be responsible for millions of coronavirus-related deaths.

People speak near a makeshift morgue outside of Bellevue Hospital on March 25, 2020 in New York City, New York. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / Getty

BY NICK FRENCH

Critics of socialism often point to the mass deaths that occurred under dictators like Stalin and Mao. Such deaths were abhorrent, of course. But one problem with this line of attack is that it selectively ignores the numerous examples of mass deaths that occurred under brutal capitalist regimes, while also overlooking the everyday deaths that are a matter of course under capitalism, caused by grinding and utterly unnecessary poverty.

Both of these realities are or soon will be confronting us under the unfolding coronavirus pandemic. The virus will likely kill millions of people in the United States alone. Many of these fatalities could have been avoided if we had a social order that placed the needs of people over profit. Make no mistake: we’re facing a pandemic that could produce one of the worst mass deaths in human history, and capitalism will be responsible for many of them.
Profit Over People

To explain why, we should first go over some basics about capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system in which a small number of people (capitalists) own the vast majority of material resources (land, buildings, factories) necessary to produce useful things. Other people, the working class — the vast majority of us — own very little or no such resources.

Members of the working class must sell their labor to capitalists for a wage in order to survive (or they must depend on the financial support of someone else who works for a wage). The capitalist then sells the products made by the worker on the market, hoping to fetch a price over and above the cost of materials and what they paid the worker who made the goods. The difference between a good’s cost of production and the price the good sells for is what the capitalist keeps as profit (and can do with whatever the hell they feel like: buy a yacht, build a fourteenth bathroom in their mansion — whatever their heart desires).

Usually, capitalists compete with one another to sell similar goods. That competition forces each capitalist to keep their prices as low as possible. But, in order to continue making a profit, capitalists need to keep costs low as well.

Competition forces each capitalist to not just make profits, but to make greater profits than their competitors, Why? Because greater profits mean a greater ability to beat out your competition moving forward: by investing in labor-saving technologies and lowering one’s labor costs, or by expanding production and making use of economies of scale, or by spending money on marketing and taking away competitors’ market share. Capitalists who fail to maximize profits will soon find themselves unable to sell their goods and be put out of business. And being put out of business means ending up in the dire position of a worker.

This way of organizing the production and distribution of goods has its virtues, as Karl Marx himself emphasized. Capitalism can inspire incredible innovation. But the same feature of the system that breeds innovation — the imperative that capitalists maximize profits — also gives rise to capitalism’s most destructive tendencies.

It means that capitalists prioritize profits over the welfare of their workers and of humanity as a whole. Owners will make their employees work in uncomfortable and dangerous conditions and refuse to pay them a living wage. They will pollute the environment with deadly toxins and planet-destroying greenhouse gases before spending money on safe production processes. And they will oppose life-saving social policies like Medicare for All because they increase their taxes and strengthen employees’ power to bargain for better wages. Which brings us back to coronavirus.

The Coronavirus and Capitalist Dysfunction


The coronavirus pandemic is showing us the many ways in which the relentless drive for profit can be deadly.

First, pharmaceutical companies could have started to develop a vaccine for the virus years ago. The novel coronavirus that is now ravaging the world is actually one of a family of coronaviruses (including SARS and MERS) with which we have long been familiar. It would have been possible to begin research on vaccines and cures for coronaviruses in general, giving us a head start on treatments for the current outbreak. But pharmaceutical companies did not pursue this research, because the prospect of a cure was not sufficiently profitable. (A similar problem afflicts development of new drugs to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.)

Researchers are now working on vaccines, but those are twelve to eighteen months away from being ready. The outbreak may well have run its course by then.

Epidemiologists estimate that the coronavirus could kill up to 2.2 million people in the United States, 510,000 in Great Britain, and 50 million people globally. Many or most of those deaths could have been avoided if we had a vaccine. We don’t have a vaccine because developing one wasn’t profitable for corporations.

Second, the measures necessary to slow the spread of the coronavirus mean that most businesses need to suspend operations, and many workers will lose their jobs or find their hours drastically reduced. In countries where left-wing political parties and strong labor movements have built robust welfare states that check some of capitalism’s worst features, this will be bad but not catastrophic.

Norway, for instance, is giving all workers affected by the coronavirus slowdown generous paid leave while businesses shut down. Denmark and the United Kingdom are putting forward a similarly expansive relief package, covering the vast majority of workers’ wages while they’re out of work.

The United States, on the other hand, has never had a powerful left party, and its labor movement is incredibly weak. As a result, the American working class confronts a particularly pure and brutal form of capitalism. Unlike countries with a stronger labor movement, we do not enjoy strong collective bargaining rights, nor basic social welfare provisions like universal health care.

That means being laid off is particularly disastrous for American workers. Losing a job could result in losing your health-care coverage or being unable to pay your student loans. Worse still, it could mean being unable to pay rent and getting evicted. Losing your health-care or home can be deadly, even in the best of times. But experiencing these hardships during a pandemic is horrific, depriving people of the ability to avoid infection or to receive treatment if they get sick.

Some workers will hold on to their jobs, but their work will put them (and those they come into contact with) at high risk of exposure to the coronavirus. Capitalists should shut down their businesses for the sake of their workers and of public health; for businesses that can’t shut down, bosses should make every effort to ensure their workers’ safety. But capitalists won’t do these things of their own free will, for a very simple reason: they hurt bosses’ bottom line.

Starbucks, for example, kept their stores open, even in cities that had ordered nonessential businesses to close. (The company has since shifted to only providing drive-through service because of employee pressure.) Many grocery stores are not providing gloves or masks, nor allowing workers to follow CDC guidelines around handwashing and social distancing.

The drive for profit is endangering untold numbers of people by allowing the virus to spread more rapidly. This is especially true in the United States, where many workers do not have paid sick leave and so will be compelled to work even if they’re sick. President Donald Trump is even considering ordering businesses to open again in April, likely at the peak of the pandemic, to protect corporate profits. Millions more could die if this happens.

Neglect of worker safety is especially unconscionable when it comes to health-care workers, our first line of defense against the coronavirus. Many hospitals are woefully understaffed and under-equipped to deal with the crisis.

At Oakland’s Highland Hospital and Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, for instance, nurses are being asked to reuse single-use face masks, making them more likely to catch the virus from infected patients and spread it to others. Similar problems are common across the United States: nurses in Seattle report a shortage of masks and other protective equipment, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Center in New York City has only a week’s supply of masks on hand. One Brooklyn Health System in Brooklyn, New York, will likely be unable to afford enough hospital beds to treat victims of the virus. These conditions mean, again, that many people will die unnecessarily.

The unpreparedness of our hospitals is not inevitable. It, too, is the product of a system that puts profit over people. If we adequately invested in public hospitals or used state resources to rapidly produce necessary medical equipment, the unfolding pandemic would not hit our health-care system nearly as hard.

Despite the fact that Italy’s health capacity has been overstressed by the particularly brutal explosion of coronavirus there, its universal single-payer health-care system is ensuring that every person, no matter their job or income level, can receive the best treatment possible. 
Single-payer systems have allowed Denmark and South Korea to quickly institute coronavirus testing on a large scale, which has been essential to their success in slowing the virus’s spread.

For the past several decades in the United States, however, capitalists have waged an all-out assault on public goods and public investment, fighting for tax cuts for billionaires and promoting reliance on “market-based” solutions — and ensuring that we don’t join the rest of the world in developing a public health system.

People Over Profit


Capitalism is making an already terrible pandemic worse, especially in countries like the United States where capitalism is relatively untamed. Much of the damage has already been done: our failure to develop a vaccine will kill millions or tens of millions, and our lack of a universal single-payer system means that many will die because they cannot get tested or treated. This is a disaster on the scale of Stalin’s gulags or Mao’s mass famines.

But we can still minimize damage by organizing for and demanding policy changes that challenge this murderous logic. We need Medicare for All, so all people can receive the treatment they need regardless of ability to pay. Continuing to support and build on Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president — a campaign that we need now more than ever — is one way to put pressure on Congress to pass a version of Medicare for All in response to the crisis.

We need paid sick leave for all workers (including gig and contract workers), so that no one is forced to come to work sick. We should force all nonessential businesses to close, and pay all workers enough to live during their time off. We should demand a freeze on rents and mortgage payments, and a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, so that no one has to worry about going homeless. And we should demand that the state use all resources at its disposal (including the requisition of private property) to rapidly expand our health system’s capacity to treat coronavirus patients. Sanders’s coronavirus platform, which incorporates all of these demands, puts forward just the sort of policies we need.

Capitalists will resist these measures, because such measures challenge their power and their profits. But they are needed to save millions of lives. We have to organize to win these demands. From auto workers to bakery and café workers and Verizon employees, working people across the country have already shut down businesses and won paid leave from their employers through strikes and the threat of strikes. This kind of disruptive action on a large scale is necessary to force owners and their public officials to take our health and safety seriously.

By exerting their collective power, workers can prevent the worst-case pandemic scenarios. But to avoid similar massacres in the future, like the one climate change could cause, we have to move beyond an economic and political system that prioritizes profit over human life.

CAPITALISM, ALIENATION, AND COVID-19

BY:MICHAEL JAMES, PHD, LPC, LCADC, ACS| JULY 21, 2020





Remember life before COVID-19? Don’t be tempted to think those were the good ol’ days. Even before social distancing, were you feeling alone, depressed, and isolated? Feeling insignificant and purposeless? Our society was sick before COVID-19.

The latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, carrying an article on the pandemic entitled “The Price of Isolation,” states, “America as a nation entered this pandemic particularly ill-equipped to handle it. For years, we have been engaged in . . . a ‘loneliness epidemic.’”[1] The Marxian term for this personal and political loneliness is alienation. Consider the varieties of alienation we suffer in capitalist society.

Alienation from One Another

Two dominant values in capitalist society are “rugged” individualism and competition. These are antisocial values. Lost are community and cooperation. Competition is fine on a soccer field, but workers in America, a society which does not share wealth, must compete for jobs, health care, and economic security. Such precariousness blocks worker solidarity and sparks racism, xenophobia, and sexism as workers fear job loss to the dreaded “other.” And America is now struggling to contain COVID-19 because many persons, asserting their individualistic freedoms, are resisting the need to wear a mask and socially distance. The antisocial capitalist ethos is “I” not “we.” It is simply un-American to subordinate individual freedom to collective need.



It is difficult to trust. We are guarded, defensive, and suspicious as we brace ourselves for the next hustle or swindle. The con job may come from the corporations or the person next door, but sometimes it seems as though everybody in capitalist society is on the make. Many cynically blame human nature, suggesting that people are naturally greedy, selfish, or predatory. Marx, as a materialist, affirmed human nature. He explained that consciousness does not determine life, but that life determines consciousness. The point is that the relations of production set the stage for human consciousness and human relations. The singular purpose of capitalism is to exploit. Therefore, exploitation characterizes human relations in this society. Marx brilliantly captured the depravity of capitalist relations, charging that the bourgeoisie “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”[2] As writer Aldous Huxley confirmed, “Our present economic, social, and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness.”[3]

Indeed, it is the material conditions created by capitalism that prompts many to recite the cliché about seeing only two roles for themselves: victim or predator. The big fish swallows the small fish. Dog eats dog. Do unto others before they do unto you. Whichever cliché you dredge up, rest assured that it is capitalism that so perverts human relations in America.

Marx, however, gave due credit to capitalism: “Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production.”[4] But capitalist America is not an economic democracy. These tremendous productive forces benefit only a few. The late activist Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) said that there are only two possibilities for any society: the means of production are either privately owned or they are socially owned. In America, of course, only a few own and control the means of production. The result? The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. Such a huge gap destroys community and adds greatly to social instability and alienation. Those who defend capitalism regard such monstrous inequality as a mere by-product of doing business. They heartlessly defend what Marx called “the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”[5]

Psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck, in his book Community-Making and Peace, warns of the destructive power of inequality: “The great enemy of community is exclusivity.” “Humans hunger for genuine community,” he writes, and “through community lies the salvation of the world. Nothing is more important.” He promises that in true community “human differences are celebrated as gifts and alienation is transformed into reconciliation.” Dr. Peck adds, “It is only through community that we can achieve health and wholeness,” and “community is the cure for our greatest contemporary trouble.” Creating community is the only way “to live in understanding and peace with all the other peoples of the world.”[6] Dr. Peck, however, is an example of a learned scholar who is lost without Marx. He pretends that community is compatible with capitalism. Without socialism, his beloved community is simply a dream.



The latest gadgets created by the productive forces of capitalism can further erode community and contribute to alienation from one another. Products and innovations are introduced to create profit, with no regard for the social impact so that, according to Marx, “every new product represents a new potency of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.”[7] For example, now nearing extinction is the social act of leaving the house to visit the local movie theater: easier to stream movies at home. And in the past, if I saw you out and about, we could say “hello” and chat, while now one of us is quite likely to be on a smartphone. This little invention, while great if your car breaks down, wreaks havoc with human psychology in several ways. It promotes an inability to delay gratification, contributes to a breakdown of boundaries and privacy, adds stress by inviting people to multi-task, contributes to rudeness when pursuing private conversations in public places, promotes self-importance and ego, and destroys community by privatizing public space. Cell phones have even contributed to a new psychological disorder: constant partial attention (CPA).

Computers and the Internet likewise contribute to alienation by promoting human isolation, burdening us with useless information, and encouraging virtual rather than face-to-face interaction. The MTV music video, while no longer a cutting-edge development, was a significant step toward alienation. It has been said to be “the death of imagination.” Traditionally, when listening to a song, it was our freedom and responsibility to conjure up corresponding images, fantasies, or associations. Now the song and the visual imagery are presented together for our passive consumption.

Our declining community is addressed in a book with the intriguing title Bowling Alone,[8] which uses disappearing bowling leagues as one small measure of our alienation. Foreigners are often shocked to learn that many of us do not know our neighbors. And Airbnb is an example of entrepreneurship that has further eroded our sense of community. Even if you are fortunate or assertive enough to know your neighbor, you might wake up one morning to discover total strangers living next door. Suddenly, you are alienated from your own neighborhood. Even if the newcomers are friendly, the fact that your neighbor commodified a private dwelling has diminished your sense of belonging and community.

Uber is another capitalist innovation with social consequences. New York taxi drivers, after having invested huge sums for a cab and operating license, are distraught at the competition they face from Uber drivers. Some of them, facing bankruptcy and financial ruin, have committed suicide. Technology often improves quality of life, but the profit motive does not allow for consideration of the human and social impact. Marx was a political economist, but his description of the constant change that the search for profit brings to capitalist society reads like poetry: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”[9]

Persons of color, LGBTQ individuals, and immigrants are victims of bias and prejudice, useful tools of the capitalist class for preventing worker solidarity. Such persons are especially alienated in their inability to live freely, openly, and safely. And what of women, who hold up half the sky? A 2015 headline in the Huffington Post read: “The U.N. Sent 3 Foreign Women to the U.S. to Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified.” The three, from Poland, Costa Rica, and England, were human rights experts leading a United Nations study. They traveled across America, visiting schools, prisons, and even an abortion clinic in Alabama where they were harassed by two vigilantes protesting reproductive rights. The human rights experts described that particular scene as a “kind of terrorism.” While they “were shocked by many things they saw in the U.S., perhaps the biggest surprise of their trip . . . was learning that women in the country don’t seem to know what they’re missing.”[10] U.S. women—having bought into bourgeois ideology, education, and culture—are alienated from basic awareness of their rights to gender equality, equal pay, paid maternity leave, affordable child care, and reproductive freedom.

The ways that we are estranged from our comrades are numerous. Our social, communal, cooperative, and collective nature is thwarted and frustrated. Capitalism denies human beings comradeship, belonging, and true community. American poet Walt Whitman wrote of the “need of comrades,” and psychologist Abraham Maslow, in his Hierarchy of Human Needs, confirmed this need. The first level of human need is physiological: food, water, sleep, and elimination. The second level of need is for safety and security. And what comes next, after these very material needs? Belonging! And, according to Maslow, where do most Americans stall out as they strive to actualize or develop? Belonging! Maslow made it clear that most of us, because of our competitive, individualistic, antisocial, alienated society, never realize our need to belong.[11] Marx, as always, said it best when he described our greatest wealth as “the other person.”[12]

Alienation from Nature


Another key value associated with capitalism is dominance over nature. Respectful coexistence is lost. Reverence and respect for nature are virtues smashed beneath capitalism’s insatiable demand for development, expansion, appropriation, and profit. Nature becomes a mere commodity for corporations and individuals to have, to consume, to degrade, and to defile. Pollution is simply good business. Marx saw that “the mode of perceiving nature, under the rule of private property and money, is a real contempt for, and a practical degradation of, nature.” Thomas Münzer, whom Marx quoted, declared it intolerable “that every creature should be transformed into property—the fishes in the water, the birds of the air, the plants of the earth: the creature too should become free.”[13]



Environmentalist and writer Edward Abbey famously noted that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”[14] Yet, how many of us grieve about the malignant development and sprawl that has transformed our once charming, green, unique communities into garish, impersonal, commercial eyesores? Scientific evidence regarding climate change and global extinction of species is overwhelmingly abundant—and alarming. Capitalism has clearly brought us to the brink of ecological apocalypse. Preventing the demise of the human race and other species will require a concerted global effort which transcends nationalism. But we have a criminal U.S. president who is ignorant, arrogant, unread, and slavishly devoted to crony capitalism, deregulated corporate anarchy, and his own personal enrichment. He has gutted EPA regulations, scoffed at international climate change treaties, and championed a militant, reactionary, narcissistic nationalism with the suicidal war cry “Make America great again.”

Climate change activist Greta Thunberg speaks with passion, courage, and a justified moral outrage. However, she and all environmentalists need to acknowledge that, to save the planet, they must become abolitionists devoted to smashing capitalism and nationalism. Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology says it well: “It seems obvious that the only way to transcend capitalism and ownership society is to work out some way of transcending the nation-state. We’ll need ‘a true participatory and internationalist socialism’ in order to free humanity.”[15] Regarding nationalism, Marx urged workers “of all countries” to unite while declaring beautifully and simply: Workers “have no country.”[16]

One aspect of alienation from nature is simply being out of touch. Many of us are so stressed or overworked that we are numb to natural beauty. Technology plays a role in distancing us from nature. Psychotherapists have observed a “loss of wonder” in children as they become more absorbed in computers, TV, and smartphones and less observant of the natural world. It is heartbreaking to contemplate children and adults who no longer experience a sense of wonder at the song of a bird, the complexity of a spider web, the shape of a cloud, or the color of a flower. Native American Crowfoot offered an indigenous view: “Life is the flash of a firefly in the night, It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.”[17]

Alienation from Labor and the Wealth Created by Labor

We are even alienated from our work. Marx knew that our labor is an expression of our essence. Our labor is sacred, a profound and fundamental manifestation of our energy, ideas, strength, and creativity. Capitalism defiles and perverts work. Our intellectual and physical labor is commodified when we sell it to a buyer in the job market. Many people despise and dread their jobs and are made physically or mentally sick by them. The diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association includes a “malingering” diagnosis, which is when a worker feigns illness to elude work.

Small wonder. In this society, most of us are alienated from our labor activity and from the product of that intellectual or physical labor. Our productive activity is not our own, the product created is not our own, and the wealth generated is not our own. We are thereby alienated from our own sweat. Your labor is an expression of you, of your deepest and truest self, but Marx saw that in capitalist society “the worker’s activity . . . belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.”[18] Labor creates all wealth. But when your labor belongs to another, you are left with nothing. You are nothing. Therefore, Marx urged workers to exclaim, “I am nothing and I should be everything.”[19]



Capitalism is a system designed to steal. The theft is so grand that it is breathtaking. In America, it began with the genocide of Native American peoples, a holocaust with an estimated 50 million dead.[20] The historic theft continued with the capture, enslavement, and selling of Africans. The attempts to measure the enormity of this theft reveal the rabid nature of US capitalism: “In 1860, over $3 billion was the value assigned to the physical bodies of enslaved Black Americans to be used as free labor,” and “in 1861, the value placed on cotton produced by enslaved Blacks was $250 million.”[21] A 2019 estimate of the total reparations due to African Americans comes to $17.1 trillion.[22]

The theft of wealth created by working people marches on today with an assault on US and foreign labor headed by multinational corporations and euphemistically known as “globalization.” Marx perfectly described the imperialism of US foreign policy: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” and capitalism “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”[23]

Alienation from Class Identity


Capitalism steals materially, through private control over the means of production and by appropriation of the wealth produced by labor, and it steals ideologically, through bourgeois popular culture, education, and corporate news and entertainment. Marx taught us that

the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.[24]

The latest estimate is that all of our news and entertainment comes from about six major corporations. Consider the chilling implications: as a worker, you are led into false consciousness and mental slavery whenever you turn on the TV, pick up a newspaper, or see a Hollywood movie. As the great Malcolm X said, “They put your mind in a bag and take it wherever they want.”[25]

US working-class history is ignored and erased. May Day, for example, is recognized around the world as the holiday of the working class. What does America have? A contrived Labor Day handed to American workers like a scrap of food tossed to an obedient dog. And every day in schools our children are assaulted with a “hidden curriculum,”[26] which presents capitalist ideology as legitimate, natural, and superior. In other words, education is part of a superstructure of culture and politics which arises from an economic base to lend legitimacy to capitalism. The ideas of America’s corporate ruling class “spread everywhere, in every nook and cranny.”[27] Educator Paulo Freire’s famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed confirmed that “there is no such thing as a neutral educational process.”[28] Education either integrates students into the present system or inspires them toward transformation and revolution.

And so, in our schools there is no working-class pedagogy. The significance of class and the class struggle is minimized, downplayed, and ignored. The truth, however, is that class is our most defining characteristic, more so than race, gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or sexual orientation. This is so because we are material creatures. As Frederick Engels said at Marx’s funeral:

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history; the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.[29]

Therefore, class consciousness is necessary for a genuine or authentic personal identity. But millions of American workers, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, young and old, intellectual and physical toiler, have false consciousness: they simply do not know who they are, do not understand their true worth, do not realize that they create all wealth, and, perhaps most tragically, do not embrace socialism as the only alternative to their exploited, degraded, and precarious condition in capitalist society.

Capitalism steals everything from the working class: our labor, our wealth, and our class-conscious identity. If you don’t know who you are, you cannot properly defend yourself. You will settle for reforms. This alienation is thorough and total. It is a loss of the authentic, class-conscious self, what Marx called “self-estrangement” or “self-alienation.”[30] The remedy is communism or socialism, which Marx defined as simply the “transcendence of human self-alienation.”[31]

Alienation from Our Historic Purpose


Does the working class exist simply to produce wealth for the bourgeoisie, to fight ruling-class wars, and to be mystified by corporate news and entertainment, forever enslaved by false consciousness? Does the working class exist to scratch and claw for mere reforms? Is it the fate of the working class to suffer and die in a climate-changed ecological catastrophe created by corporate polluters? The answers are “no.”

Marx saw that capitalism could be the last “antagonistic” period in which society is divided by conflicting and irreconcilable class interests. He therefore assigned one task to his esteemed working class: revolution! Our sacred duty is to be abolitionists. We must abolish class distinctions and the profit motive and private control over production and distribution. We must produce and distribute socially. We must establish economic democracy. Marx and Engels, in the Manifesto, called us to action: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”[32]

COVID-19 has dragged us down to the second level of Maslow’s hierarchy: the need for safety and security. And even though we are still dealing with the immediate and deadly consequences of the virus, it is certain the long-term impact will be to further our alienation. The capitalist class is sure to use the virus to tighten its grip on production, intensify its war on labor, and further impoverish and degrade the working class. So we must be ever mindful of our historic task to overcome alienation and to build socialist society.

Notes

[1] Alex Morris, “The Price of Isolation,” Rolling Stone, July 2020, p. 63.
[2] Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.
[3] Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy.
[4] Marx, Grundrisse.
[5] Marx, Preface to Capital, vol. 1.
[6] M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, Simon & Schuster, 1987.
[7] Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
[8] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, revised and updated, Simon & Schuster, 2020.
[9] Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.
[10] Laura Bassett, “The U.N. Sent 3 Foreign Women to the U.S. to Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified.” Huffington Post, September 22, 2015.
[11] B. R. Hergenhahn, An Introduction to Theories of Personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984.
[12] Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Continuum, 1992, p. v.
[13] Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1844.
[14] Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in the Defense of the American West. New York: Plume, 1977.
[15] Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.
[16] Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.
[17] Hyemeyohsts Storm, Seven Arrows. New York: Ballantine Books, p. 67.
[18] Marx, “Estranged Labour.” In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
[19] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844.
[20] Steve Charleston, Victims of an American Holocaust. Washington, DC: Sojourners, 1992.
[21] Rashawn Ray and Andre M. Perry, “Why We Need Reparations for Black Americans.” Brookings, April 15, 2020.
[22] Kristin Myers, “Slavery Reparations Could Carry a $17 Trillion Price Tag,” Yahoo Finance, June 28, 2019.
[23] Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1844.
[24] Marx, The Germany Ideology, 1846.
[25] Malcolm X, February 1965: The Final Speeches, edited by Steve Clark. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992, p. 154.
[26] Edward Stevens, George Wood, and James Sheehan, Justice, Ideology, and Education. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992, p. 112.
[27] Geoffrey Partington, “The Concept of Progress in Marxist Educational Theories.” Comparative Education 24, no. 1 (1988), p. 84.
[28] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1995, p. 16.
[29] Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, p. 258.
[30] Marx, “Estranged Labour.” In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
[31] Introduction, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. xxv.
[32] Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.

Further Reading: see Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

Cover image: Scott Loftesness, Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Images: Sitting apart, Ding Yuin Shan, Creative Commons (BY 2.0); Woman on cell phone, Fouquier, Creative Commons (BY-NC 2.0); Planet before Profit, Markus Spicke, Pexels; Workers mural, photo by Ari Evergreen, Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Who is that Masked Man?

Who is that Masked Man?

A firey spirit, with a commitment to truth, a glow of trust, and a hearty “We can do it!” Joe Biden

A central issue in the Presidential campaign has been the contentious debate over mask wearing. What should have been a very clear approach from a public health perspective deteriorated to an issue of what side of the political debate one was on.

President Trump and his supporters refused to wear masks. They disdained mask wearing as a sign of weakness and capitulation to the overreach of government bureaucrats; an infringement on the basic rights of American citizens to decide for themselves what is the best thing for them to do. They questioned whether the science was clear on whether mask wearing was that beneficial in protecting the public from the COVID-19 virus. Those who chose to wear masks were frequently derided as being sheep, even being called out in public spaces for doing so.

On the other hand, Joe Biden and his supporters wore masks. They called for all Americans to wear masks as a civic responsibility to protect themselves, their families, and anyone else they came into contact with. They argued that the science was clear on the benefits of mask wearing, pointing to the statements of infectious disease experts and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Those who refused to wear masks were condemned as selfish and irresponsible, endangering themselves, their families, and the public at large.

ANOTHER HERO WHO WEARS A MASK

The contention over whether to wear masks spilled into the public arena. Law enforcement authorities in some areas announced that they would not enforce mask wearing mandates from State or local governmental leaders. Retail stores sent mixed messages. Some had no requirements to wear masks. Others posted mask wearing requirements but did little or nothing to enforce them; shoppers wandered through their stores with no consequences for not wearing masks. Others both posted and enforced mask wearing requirements. In such instances, there were encounters with customers who refused to wear masks. These customers would get into heated exchanges with store employees who were simply doing their jobs by informing the individual that they either had to put on a mask or leave. Security personnel would often have to be called to escort these individuals from the store over their loud protestations.

Meanwhile, the spread of the virus exploded across the nation. Deaths from the virus continually rose, now reaching over 200,000. Finally, the President himself, his family, and those who had contact with him have fallen ill. The President has been hospitalized. Unlike many Americans, he has access to the finest medical care in the country, being given the most advanced therapies which are out of the reach of many Americans who fall ill. At the same time, the President continues his assault against Obamacare which will result in millions of Americans losing the high cost, paltry medical care that they can receive.

All this over the rather straightforward issue of wearing a mask. With cases of the virus and the number of deaths rapidly rising, at rates much higher in other countries across the globe particularly those with mask wearing mandates, it would seem that the most cautionary and sensible approach would be to wear masks. Yet the President refused to take the lead on such a basic issue.

When George Trendle and Fran Striker developed the character of the Lone Ranger, they listed a moral code by which the Ranger lived. These included:

  • I believe that to have a friend, a man must be one.
  • That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.
  • In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for what is right.
  • That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number.
  • That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, live on forever.

Little wonder that Donald Trump disdains mask wearing and Joe Biden supports it